Multnomah County chair Jessica Vega Pederson released a proposed $4 billion budget plan this week. The budget includes cuts to several programs and over 100 positions to address a $77 million shortfall. Earlier this year the county asked local and state jurisdictions to help fill a shortfall of over $100 million in the county’s homeless services budget. Chair Vega Pederson joins us to explain her budget proposal.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with the proposed budget that Multnomah County Chair, Jessica Vega Pederson, released yesterday. The county is projected to have about $4 billion. That’s slightly more than last year, but rising costs have greatly outpaced that increase. That means proposed cuts to homeless services, to the health department, to the district attorney’s office, in addition to the full elimination of a handful of programs. More than 100 full-time equivalent positions would be eliminated. Jessica Vega Pederson joins us now to talk about all this. Welcome back to the show.
Jessica Vega Pederson: Thanks, Dave. Good to be here.
Miller:. I want to start with one of the programs that would be cut entirely, the Nurse Family Partnership. What does it do?
Vega Pederson: So the Nurse Family Partnership is a program where families normally have a very long time where they have a nurse that comes into their home to help them with some of the things they need assistance with. So it’s been about a two-year program. This is something that has been a program that is throughout the state, so other counties have done it, and it’s a program that we’ve had in Multnomah County for several years.
Miller: Why cut it?
Vega Pederson: So, this is a program that has actually been proposed by the department as a cut for the last few years for my budget. We aren’t seeing the same outcomes and the same engagement through the life of the program here in Multnomah County as we see in some other counties. So for me, because we have a deficit this year that we really have to grapple with and because we can’t have the deficit this size and not have to make cuts, I was really looking at the programs and services that have the most impact and the best outcomes and, because this is a program that seemed to to continue to have some challenges, it was a year to make that cut. I will say that, we really looked hard and I really looked hard at the larger ecosystem of home visiting services that we provide at the county and are trying to sustain those as much as possible.
Miller: What about the other programs that would be cut entirely – the county’s campaign finance program, its passport service, the implementation of the ban on gas-powered leaf blowers?
Vega Pederson: Yeah. So again, I was looking very keenly at those programs that are providing direct services, that are having really strong outcomes, and looking at those programs that have the most impacts on marginalized communities, that are benefiting marginalized communities the most. Talking about the public campaign finance program, this is a program that I was really excited about being able to start at the county level, but it’s a brand new program. And when we’re looking at such cuts across the county, it didn’t seem right to fund a new program at the expense of other ongoing programs.
I think in the same way with the gas-powered leaf blower, we want to see how we can continue to support the city of Portland’s implementation of the ordinance, so we’re having conversations with our Public Health Department and offices about sustainability of what that could look like, but it is going to look different than what we originally envisioned.
Miller: Is it fair to say that this is the most clear-cut policy case where you have to decide what really matters and what doesn’t? And in this case, you are saying in terms of funding that implementing a gas-powered leaf blower ban, even if you were in favor of it, it’s just less important than a lot of other things the county is doing. Is it too naked to say it that way or is that the way you think about this?
Vega Pederson: No, I mean, every year we have to make hard decisions. When the ARPA dollars were lost, we had to make some hard decisions, but it really was this year. And I will say for the next several years in our budget where we’re looking at different levels of deficits, we do have to make those hard decisions about what are the most critical services that the county supports and how are we going to prioritize those in light of all of the other ways that we can be spending our money.
Miller: What did you ask departments to give you in terms of various levels of potential cuts, and then what did you do with all of that data that came in?
Vega Pederson: Yeah, so my budget guidance to departments comes out at the end of the previous year, and most departments were asked to propose cuts at the 8%, 10% and 12% level. At the time that that guidance came out, our estimate of the deficit was about $21 million. I didn’t ask that across the board. So for instance, the Multnomah County Sheriff I held harmless for having to put forward a reduction budget. For the Department of Community Justice, for the District Attorney’s Office, I only asked for 3% cuts because we needed to prioritize some of the core community services, especially those that rely most on general fund dollars.
When it came to their recommended budgets, they had those different levels of proposal, and when I was making my decisions about this executive budget that just came out. The deficit had shrunk a little bit for our general fund ‒ only $15 million ‒ but we still knew we had this huge gap in the homeless services department. So having that higher level of cuts to kind of look at allowed me to put together a budget that reflected again where we could focus on the most needed services and how we could fill some of the bigger gaps that we had around homeless services.
Miller: Yesterday was notable for the unusually public spat between you and District Attorney Nathan Vasquez. He had a press conference and his basic argument was that your proposed budget has too severe a cut to public safety and to his department, to the District Attorney’s Office. You have said in response, you said yesterday, the numbers in my budget speak for themselves. What do you mean?
Vega Pederson: Yeah, I think the very fact that from the beginning, I tried to prioritize our investments in community safety, whether it was around our parole and probation, the District Attorney’s Office only being asked to do a 3% cut, the sheriff’s office and jails, none. I think that speaks for itself. But I also want to make sure that folks understand that even before those reductions were asked, I put about $2.2 million worth of one-time only expenses that had been in the DA’s budget this year, I rolled those into ongoing funds.
Miller: Meaning you turned what had been one-time only funded positions into ongoing funded. Is that different from the way you treated other departments?
Vega Pederson: Yes, that is. It’s very rare to do that from the get-go before they’re asked to do any reductions. We did that with the auditor’s office. We funded an ombudsperson assistant position in the same way to to help her not have to take such big cuts, because I do recognize that there are different sizes of budgets and some cuts come harder, but that means that those 10 or 11 positions that were funded with that $2.2 million of ongoing fund for the district attorney, that’s going to be built into his budget now from here ongoing. It will always be part of his continuing service level budget, and so those positions are locked in.
Miller: He also took issue just more broadly with your priorities for spending and your use of general fund money to backfill part of the gap in homeless services. I want to play a part of what he said at a press conference yesterday.
Nathan Vasquez [recording]: So, she is doubling down on some very failed issues that we’ve had in this community, and she’s taking it out of our core funding, our general fund, instead of funding the District Attorney’s Office, instead of funding the Department of Community Justice, maybe in fact improving with the sheriff’s office. So this is a direct move in the wrong direction for this community.
Miller: What’s your response?
Vega Pederson: Well, I will say that we know that the homelessness crisis is something that is a priority for our entire community to resolve, to address with urgency. We have… Part of the work that our homeless service department has been really leaning into is better data, and the new data dashboard that just came out earlier this month shows us that we have identified more people are experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County than we ever have before. And I think it’s incumbent upon us as elected officials to respond to that in the right way.
Even with the dollars that we have from the general fund reallocated to our Homeless Services Department, we still have a 22% decrease in our Homeless Services Budget compared to what we have in the previous year. And so we know that, even between the city and the county, there are really hard decisions that had to be made about our continuum of homeless services.
But this is not the time to back away. We really have to keep investing in the programs that we know are working, and we are housing more people than ever before. We are sheltering more people than ever before, but I think the reality is the size of the program requires us to keep investing so that we can get a handle on this and we can see the difference that our community needs in the next year or two.
Miller: So if I understand what you’re saying correctly in terms of that 22%, there’s going to be a big reduction, and even with some money going from the general fund to plug part of the holders, we’re looking at a big reduction from the amount of money the county spent on homeless services this year to what you’re proposing it spends next year. What kind of impact is that going to have? What are examples of services that are being offered now that will not be offered a year from now?
Vega Pederson: Yeah, so my priorities in looking at the Homeless Services Department budget was making sure that we were not going to… Somebody who is currently being housed with dollars, we’re not going to lose their housing in the next year. I did not want to increase the number of people who are experiencing homeless because of that. Same thing, that we are not backing down on the number of shelter beds. So there’s not an additional shelter bed that will be closing. In fact, my budget actually restores some of the congregate shelter seats that weren’t in the department budget. And making sure that we are still in line to reach our HRAP goals, even if it’s not as quickly as we’d have liked. And I think that’s where you’re going to see some of these impacts.
Miler: What do you mean in particular?
Vega Pederson: Well, for instance, we have goals of supporting permanent supportive housing. And there are actually 200 planned permanent supportive housing slots that we are not going to be… that we had to step back from that we had planned to do in the next year. In the same way we’re looking at our adult shelter system and we had to slow down our ability to increase those shelter beds.
But it was important to me that we still start expanding, you know, keep expanding that system, so we are including expansion of our family, we are including expansion of our LGBTQIA2S+ shelter beds. So, we’re still doing it, we’re just not being able to do things across the board.
But the reason that is important is because we couldn’t we couldn’t starve the continuum. We still know that the number of people who are entering homelessness each month in this county are greater than the number who are leaving, so we couldn’t take away all the money from prevention. We couldn’t take away all the dollars from people that help people move from shelter or from the street into housing or those dollars that are helping people successfully stay there.
Miller: At the same time, the county announced yesterday, 13 beds for sobering up were added to the new deflection center, and you’re on track to complete a new sobering center. Why is this an important investment in a really tight budget year? You said, let’s not do new things necessarily. This is a new thing.
Vega Pederson: Yeah, this is a new thing, but we actually have a huge amount of resources that we have to help invest in this. So, the permanent… The new sobering beds, the 13 sobering beds, that are opening up partially are being funded by the $25 million that the state legislature allocated to the county for sobering and crisis stabilization back in the last short session. And I really want to give kudos to Commissioner Brim-Edwards because she’s been such a leader in that work.
I will say sobering beds are something that has been needed in our community for several years, about five years since the last one closed in 2019. This is really a resource to help people who might be outside on the street in intoxication who would otherwise be going to emergency departments or to jail or staying there on the street. This is a place for people to go. This is going to make a visible difference for what’s happening on our street and for those people getting on a path to stability and recovery.
Miller: You mentioned state money there from a previous session. Lawmakers right now, they’re still working on their budget for the next biennium. We have no idea what’s going to happen in the coming months or year from the federal government. How could all that at the state or federal levels affect the Multnomah County budget that’s going to be voted on in just a month and a half?
Vega Pederson: So, every time that there’s a long session, we have to vote on our budget before the state finishes their session. So we are going to have to do a budget rebalance in the fall for the county. We have to do that every time there’s a long session. I think we do have an opportunity though right now to have conversations with legislators about the importance of investing in behavioral health, investing in a homelessness service system that’s going to benefit the whole state and is urgently needed, especially here in Multnomah County in the Portland region. So, I’m looking forward to having alignment between Multnomah County, the city of Portland, our commissions and boards and making that request and making sure that legislators understand the impact that they can have on what’s happening here.
Miller: Are you anticipating another big round of cuts next year?
Vega Pederson: We are looking at a small deficit right now for next year and then a larger one in the outlying years. I think it’s really going to depend on what happens with that state budget, what federal cuts are going to happen, and how some of the cost drivers like wages and cost of living impact our ongoing budget.
Miller: Jessica Vega Pederson, thanks very much.
Vega Pederson: Thank you so much, Dave.
Miller: Jessica Vega Pederson is the Multnomah County chair.
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